Imagine Stack Overflow only having the option to upvote Questions and Answers. The ratio of likes vs dislikes of a TED talk does help me to decide if I should stop watching a video which just isn't getting better.

You are sabotaging your community and your platform.  

We didn't get to vote for this, we didn't get to consent to this,  you just do things to our ability to discern legit information from disinformation. 

We will file  reports to the fcc and ftc and local representatives about the dangers of this platform as a response.

YouTube needs to recognize that videos which are encouraging kids to commit ad fraud, download risky "gaming plugins" and other behavior that exposes them to account takeover risks, need ways for researchers to get those videos pulled, and/or communicate risks to end-users.

Your studies also show that wildly unpopular videos and people are the ones to benefit from this.

In my opinion this is a terrible change.

Often misleading videos will also have comments disabled, the only way to get an indication that a video is misleading is to see the like:dislike ratio.

Well done on making your platform less useful for the user.

Why not just make it optional? Why force it on everyone, why not let the smaller channels under attack disable it themselves, or allow others to enable it manually?

When has youtube ever cared about the little guys? Not with DMCAs, or demonetization. The big channels are always prioritised. And this is no different.

This is just to protect the image of media conglomerations who post clips here and nothing more.

Dislikes are so usefull to alerting less tech savvy viewers about scams, misinformation, or stolen footage.

Also greatly disrespectful on Matt Koval's part that he assumes that we'll just forget about this and "get used to it".

Video creators have always been able to disable the upvote/downvote ratios and comments.

Every single time I have encountered a video where the counts have been disabled by the creator, it’s because the video has something objectively wrong with it. It’s inaccurate, misleading, poor quality, offensive, or some has some other generally negative attribute.

This happens less so with comments being disabled. Videos with high up to down vote ratios but with disabled comments are usually because the creator is being attacked by trolls. These videos are usually pretty interesting to watch.

This is a short sighted change and is removing an important quality signal to viewers.

If that is true, then why not enable dislikes for large channels? Especially big brands/advertisers.

So, basically, you proved that it isn’t an attack, and more like herd mentality?

The repeated use of the words “attack” and “harassment” here really makes your creepy ulterior motives that much clearer.

Now we have to spend hours watching useless content, and the only one profiting is Youtube from ad revenue.

Edit: Oh you're just copying TikTok.

YT is more than just a place for funny videos but with this you're neglecting all the tutorials and educational content by making us unable to approximately determine their credibility, removing the only measure there is for it (no, views =/= credibility).

Everyone get their memes from TikTok now, and I guess we'll have to get our tutorials from somewhere else too.

Eye for an eye.

If you're removing dislike count, then remove like count as well. Don't be "that guy", Google.

How this will help to protect your viewers from potential scammers or harmful information. Dislike button for masses has more informative character than just bully small youtubers or big companies. This idea is unethical and as company you must take responsibility to protect your customers against scammers and misinformation, not giving to a potential scammer a tool. Specifically this changes will cause multiple cases against Google for promote scams and misinformation on social platform YouTube and will leave bad mark on the company and will associate with scam and misinformation, your clients will start leaving you, as it was before with ads scandal. By helping your client you only shoot to yours and theirs foots (They just don't know it yet). 

P.S. I think you should post full research with numbers, that would be great.

Hi, it is not really a form of censorship, thats true. But it is a form of disinformation.

It is NICEWASHING... youtube try to nice all things up and it helps nobody... no content creator will be helped if there video is disliked, they see the dislikes anyway. Its only limit the point of view from other watchers. They only have the indicator of "its nice" not of "its bad"... and that is really really bad.

The only reason to do this is to help companies to look nice and that is a awful practice! Its like make all the negative comments invisibel to all other users. So you dont really censor anyting, but you manipulating the view of the watchers and that is even worse than censoring.

Youtube has the responsability with its big name and its millions of viewers to give them a correct and unedited view on opinions. Not nicewashing there view because something you think is better for them. Thats a thing a dictator would do!

If you say you want to give the content creater an option that the like and dislike are compleetly disabeld or hidden for all. Thats also okey... because the view is in a form of neutral. But to only disable the negative side, you do nicewashing.

So please stop this, your customer are not the ones who pay you to put there adds in, the customers are the million viewers who give you the chance to get payed from them. You take something from your real customers and alienated them. You don't trust them, you think you know better what they want and need.

If you want to know what is the future of a company who alienated there fans, what to disney and starwars or the activision blizzard and world of warcraft. You do the same mistake, you don't ask, you only do.. and thats horrible for customers who pay you with there watchtime to watch all the adds. Don't think that they like this, its awful for them.

Also have a nice day!

Small grammar correction:

> as long as you don’t display or share dislike data with end your users.

You're not fooling anyone with your bogus justification for censorship. You're just making yourself look like the CCP. Have fun with that.

I'm sure your advertisers and content farms are super happy though!

The dislike counter is the only way to determine if a video is clickbait, a scam, or propaganda without having to waste time viewing it. It is a tool to meter our time and to protect us from malicious creators.

Your contempt for our intelligence is plain by the way you lie through your teeth about its real intent. This is to conceal public pushback against unpopular ideas. It IS censorship and you're hoping we'll believe it's for our benefit.

They just totally missed the point. The dislikes are not for a creator, but for the audience to indicate if the content is good or not.

__

Oh, well maybe people thought the dislike was meaningless, because they couldn't see the result of the action. Do an experiment where you hide likes. Oh, now people like the videos less often. Who would have thought...

__

This is one of the worst decisions ever made by YouTube.

This is a terrible decision for the viewers of the platform.

I've often relied on the the like/dislike ratio to filter low value or misleading videos, or to get a sense of the opinion of most viewers, if the video is controversial.

Removing it gives a false sense of security to creators and does a disservice to viewers.

I hope this decision gets reversed sooner or later, or having an actual dislike will be yet another competitive edge for competing platforms.

No, that doesn't help. I don't dislike a video to let the creator know I didn't like their content, that's just an unfortunate side effect. I do it so other viewers can know it's not good content, or to let others know that I don't agree with an idea / concept, and they don't have to either. I don't see "bandwagoning" as a bad thing in 90% of cases... it likely means that the downvote ratio caused viewers to be more skeptical (and rightly so) of the video's content.

No, that doesn't help. What use is a dislike if no one else can see it? It's pointless. Like it or not, this is effectively censorship. You're not removing the ability to dislike, you are just removing all meaning from it. Even if creators can still see their own dislikes, you have to think about this from a viewer perspective as well.

What a load of BS. You said it yourself we can still dislike, just now we cannot see how many. How does that prevent dislike attacks? If a group wanted to perform a "dislike attack" there is nothing in place here that is stopping them. The only thing it does is make dislikes effectively not matter. Why even have the dislike at all anymore? It's as much a tool to creators as it is to people watching. I could see a solution being removing dislikes if you get more than a certain number within a certain period on a channel that is of a certain (small) size, but making it private is not a great solution. In addition, creators can already disable the likes/dislikes on their videos, could you explain how that isn't a suitable solution to dislike mobs?

"because the count was not visible to them, we found that they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count"
If that's what you found then it's what you found, but I'd like to see a published report on this "experiment." It's surprising to me that not seeing the total dislikes would discourage others from also disliking. Your Rewind for example, it got so many dislikes because it was trash, not because people were jumping on a dislike bandwagon. I believe you would still have gotten at least 80% of the dislikes even with the count private.

This seems like a 'band-aid' fix when you should really be going after the root problem. I'd also be interested in more "experiments" on how useful the users find the dislike button. The results may surprise you.

Right now you seem to claim this is in response to smaller creators being unfairly disliked. And sure, that may be a big problem occurring, but this is a using a sledgehammer for a little nail. Trying to take the angle of protecting your (smaller) creators is honestly insulting and a weak argument. If you truly cared, you'd allow special protections for smaller channels, but lift those protections once the channel (or video) gets sufficiently large enough. That way it won't seem like you're protecting giant corps and advertisers. But you won't do that because it was never about the small channels to begin with. Very bad move YT, I'd encourage you to rethink this situation and find an alternative solution.

In your post you seem to indicate the primary reason to do this is to prevent targetted dislike “campaigns”, but I find that explanation as either extremely misleading or extremely incompetent. I suspect the former so I doubt my next points will be illuminating to anyone but there are plenty of alternative methods to detect and stop mass disliking on videos. You can easily train a model to detect a type of trending or link-referred upspike in downvotes. I don’t believe your purported primary reasoning for this change from a technical point of view and I’m even further bothered that a potentially “we’re trying to do the right thing here and protect people” is being used as a misleading repositioning of a change purely meant to benefit youtube and their business model. 

👎

Plus it feels like censorship and/or protecting major brands. Those are the ones that get dislikes of any real significance.  If this only applies to smaller brands or was for the creators themselves to turn off and not a broad policy I’d believe this spin better.

For example, a recent Nintendo video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNsGXJ6Cl00, where they introduced a price increase, now has 10x the number of dislikes as compared to likes which shows the community's response to the content.

Please don't do this. Take a look at Russian domestic-targeted govt propaganda videos and their dislike counts, are you really trying to protect the likes of them too?

In other cases, the like/dislike count is an important indicator of relevance of the video in question, e.g. related to DIY activity and such

The fact that extremely inappropriate content can be seen all over YouTube meanwhile they say they care about you mental health is laughable. I wonder why, after all this time, they choose to remove the like button. Perhaps they were worried about the overwhelming numbers of dislikes on their propaganda videos.

When a liar is caught lying they become very desperate.

For many of us, we rely on the downvotes as a gauge to know what content is simply a waste of time. We also know and understand that a certain number of dislikes is to be expected. And it sucks that smaller channels get disliked by competing channels, but more often than not, it is a useful indicator of the quality of the content.

This decision simply invalidates and devalues the entire purpose of Likes and Dislikes! I will no longer care how many Likes a video has as it may have just as many or even more Dislikes!

And if you do this, you might as well get rid of the comments section as well cause that's where people will now show their dislikes for the content.

I saw a video that recommended against buying from a PC manufacturer. The problem with the video was it ignored the strengths of the manufacturer.  Also, it made superficial recommendations  to use other manufacturers without explaining why.   The video was a waste of my precious time and I disliked it.  Now this important signal will be hidden from other users researching this manufacturer.

If “dislike attacks” are a concern, give the content creator the ability to hide dislikes for a short time but restrict how often they can do it.

The binary all-or-nothing decision on dislike visibility to viewers goes too far.  Viewers will get nothing to spot low quality videos.

Do I get a discount on YouTube Premium for the degraded viewer experience?

Imo this change hurts viewers and you have not given a rationale for why it has to be implemented globally this way to reach your goals.

Dislikes are the fastest signal about the quality of the content for me. They are the only direct signal available to a viewer to communicate other viewers shouldn't waste their time like the voter did by watching. I certainly use them this way. E.g. bad/low quality tutorials or reviews pretty reliably have bad vote ratios.

If downvotes are disconcerting to some creators why not allow them to opt-in to this change instead of making it global? That way the signal stays intact for viewers as opt-in would be rare in the vast majority of youtube. They do not suffer from these controversies this change attempts to target.

But with this change since I can't view the general sentiment and agree or disagree this will push me to actually press the dislike button more in order to make sure the message past.

Laser

I only can explain YouTube in 5 words.

YouTube. Is. All. About. Money.

Yeah they didn't even do anything about the sex bots that's proof. There are minors on YouTube that could click on their channel and start watching dirty videos while on the other end the person who created those spam bots, gain money.

It's either this.

Videos get disliked which "harasses" the content creator

Or misinformation which is way worse than getting dislikes on a video. (Jokes on you, google assistant, you said your enemy is misinformation :P) Btw what will a dislike do to you? Shoot you? Kill you?

It's an easy dilemma to come over with.